Wearable Sensor System for Detecting Gait Parameters of Abnormal Gaits: A Feasibility Study

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the feasibility of a wearable, low-cost optical, inertial, and force sensor suite for measuring the gait parameters of an abnormal gait. A pair of wearable shoes fused with range sensor arrays (WSFRSA) are developed for the gait analysis of normal and abnormal human walking. With the multiple small-size insole force sensors, the WSFRSA provides the real-time gait parameter estimations, such as normalized foot peak pressure, stance ratio, walking velocity, step-time variability, and so on. The fusion scheme is implemented to integrate the gyroscope and the range sensor measurements to obtain the foot pose estimation. We focus on the feasibility study and comparison of the gait parameters estimation using the WSFRSA and other methods. The results show a significantly less stride length and walking velocity, higher stance ratio, and step-time variability in the abnormal gait without toe rotation than those in normal walking gait. The WSFRSA shows highly agreement results with the reference system and acceptable performance for detecting the abnormal gait without the toe rotation.

I. Introduction

Diabetes mellitus, a chronic disease caused by the body’s inability to produce or use insulin, can result in other body disorders such as a high risk of fall [1] and the forefoot ulcers [2]. Gait characteristics of diabetic patients are important for clinical researchers and practitioners to assess patients’ health conditions. Optical motion capture systems (e.g., [3]) are widely used in laboratory environment as a standard tool for gait analysis. Stationary force plates are also used to provide the ground reaction force (GRF) measurements to estimate the joint torques/forces. However, these tools and devices are impracticable for gait analysis of personal daily living or outdoor activities.